There ain't no samurai, there are few geisha, Japanese are not the most polite people in the world. In practice, there is no special love or care for nature, nor is Japan uniquely unique. Sorry, but the sugar-coated fantasyland-Japan of Edwin O. Reischauer et al does not exist--if it ever did.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Last week, The Japan Times ran a Bloomberg interview with Shintaro Ishihara in which the proudly provocative Tokyo governor followed up his contention that foreigners were behind the city's rising crime rate. He challenged his interviewers to go to Roppongi and see for themselves. "Africans -- and I don't mean African-Americans -- who don't speak English are there doing who knows what," he said.

Part of a short, quick article with little detail about what many think of Africans, and one Japanese reporter's attempt to go a little deeper than Isihara and the Japanese "police" and media's shallow, stereotypical, and simplistic view.

(In the 80s, Ishihara reportedly stated that the reason many young Japanese women visited Guam was so that they could find African American men with huge penises so that the women could have sex with them. I guess Blinky was offended since he was not involved for some reason.)